Jane Satterfield

Horn Dance

An annual folk dance held each autumn in Abbots Bromley, Staffordshire, whose origins remain uncertain. Male dancers hold aloft reindeer antlers that have been carbon-dated to the 11th century.

It’s why you’re here at summer’s

end, one more reveler who joins

the archetypes of another century—

archer, hobby horse, Maid Marian, lutist,

fool, a child who chimes the triangle—all moving

in measured steps as if some forest god holds sway…

In the square beside the Royal Oak,

the melodeon’s music rings clear,

deer men hoist antlers in a green rite’s jaunty dance.

The horns withhold their deep-time truths—

are they Viking relics, tribute or trophy

passed down from warrior to kin, heraldic symbols

of greenwood sovereignty? Revel shares a root with rebel—

a link in boisterous mirth. The dancers leap, twirl,

advance while tradesfolk hawk their wares.

Not far from here, the woodland,

a registered preserve, prefigures history,

its cool floor strewn with fairy rings

and ancient hunting magic. Visitors ride bike trails

as columns of fallow deer cross from sunshine

into shade. Moonrise marks revelry’s end, the antlers

brought back into church to hang in the nave another year—

real ale aficionados clink glasses in the garden

of a half-timbered inn, toasting totems of lost mystery.

Jane Satterfield has published five poetry books, including The Badass Brontës, a winner of the Diode Editions Poetry Prize, Apocalypse Mix (Autumn House Poetry Prize), Her Familiars, and Assignation at Vanishing Point (Elixir Press Poetry Award). She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowship, the 49th Parallel Award for Poetry from Bellingham Review, the Ledbury Poetry Festival Prize, and more. Recent poetry and essays appear in The Common, DIAGRAM, Ecotone, Interim, Literary Matters, The Missouri Review, Orion, Shenandoah, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. Satterfield has served on the faculty of the Frost Farm and West Chester Poetry Conferences. She is married to poet Ned Balbo and lives in Baltimore, where she is a professor of writing at Loyola University Maryland.